iPerf the tool to test Bankwidth of Network

In my daily office tasks, I often need to measure the actual throughput of local network links, whether wired or wireless. To accomplish this, I use the iPerf tool, which is ideal for this purpose.

In this tutorial, I’ll guide you on how to use iPerf effectively. Since I’m demonstrating this on Windows, start by downloading iPerf for Windows and placing it on your Desktop or another location of your choice.

Now go to that folder using cd [FolderName], in my case I place it on desktop.

C:\Users\jpudasaini\Desktop\iperf>dir

03/13/2013  08:07 AM    <DIR>          .
03/13/2013  08:07 AM    <DIR>          ..
08/15/2010  01:54 AM            46,094 cyggcc_s-1.dll
08/15/2010  01:54 AM           791,566 cygstdc++-6.dll
08/31/2010  09:00 AM         2,648,181 cygwin1.dll
06/22/2011  03:56 PM    <DIR>          doc
03/13/2013  07:09 AM         1,268,927 iperf-2.0.5-2-win32.zip
02/02/2011  02:00 PM            95,125 iperf.exe
03/13/2013  08:07 AM               298 test.txt
               6 File(s)      4,850,191 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  36,552,073,216 bytes free

Now its time to create the SERVER first, use following command to create a server,

C:\Users\jpudasaini\Desktop\iperf>iperf -s

As you can see  that you are in iperf directory, from just use following command to test the actual bandwidth of the link

C:\Users\jpudasaini\Desktop\iperf>iperf -c 10.10.10.10

Output might look like this
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.10.10.10, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.10.10.11 port 54723 connected with 10.10.10.10 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   100 MBytes  84.0 Mbits/sec

If you like to test bidirectional use this command

C:\Users\jpudasaini\Desktop\iperf>iperf -c 10.10.10.10 -d